Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The Economics of Organization

Commentary by Roger Erickson

This is a neglected topic that many disciplines should be able to find common ground in. How can an adaptive system maintain a competitive Adaptive Rate if its information channels don't allow any and all system feedback patterns to float freely?

Should our 1% Central Planners dominate cultural information exchange?

Data is meaningless without context, and if an electorate cannot stay adequately abreast of FULL context, then it is taking complete uncertainty, not just extreme risks regarding its own national security.

Cultural information channels allow free flow of all available and emerging feedback, so that a populous may at least attempt to know much of what it's members know. In every form of systems science known, an Output Gap, Achievement Gap or Agility Gap inevitably follows a Distributed Information Gap.

Given that an adequately informed electorate is the best defense for a free people, what is the point of letting personal profit motives throttle what information flows through still-significant cultural feedback channels? Today, that still means our regional media firms.

So, Should the Koch Brothers Own The Tribune Newspapers?

If not, who should manage and regulate public information channels?

Further, if the Tribune and other, privately-owned media outlets are all bottlenecks limiting how quickly America can know what American's know .... what other self-informing models should we turn to to keep us all best informed of what minimal data best defines looming contexts?

Fluidly evolving required data flow patterns is a requirement for maintaining Adaptive Rate, in any system - whether an intracellular, physiological, military, economic or cultural system.

Our most compelling need is to continue to have MOST OF US sort out what few things are relevant for further national evolution, while promptly ignoring everything that isn't.

However, that primal issue ISN'T EVEN MENTIONED in economics textbooks!

We need to enlarge our policy space and increase our policy agility - and both require significantly faster TEMPO in altering our public information channels. How can can we get there from here? What new methods do we need?




3 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

Much of conventional economics assumes a market state based on markets free of govt, and characterized by perfect competition, perfect knowledge, and no market imperfections or friction. When that is the assumption, what's the problem?

Paulo Garrido said...

Tom

The problem is the recessive evolution this human species, in this planet, at this time can take in a long run.
Evolution becomes recessive when exploring at the frontier of the unknown is abandoned in favor of already experienced states.
Exploring at the frontier of the unknown means zeroing population increase and increasing life standards all over the planet.
To increase life standards one must increase production implying to increase exergy or free energy consumption and removal.
Say that overall power or exergy consumption per year would be doubled with current knowledge resources. Say that increases in efficiency would allow for tripling the product. Roughly this would mean an average product of 30 thousand USD per year. Rightly distributed this increase could eradicate poverty all over the planet.
Yet, this would not be the end of the story as to maintain such power level we need to make fusion a practical energy source or find a planetary cushion of hydrocarbons between the mantle an the crust as the Russian school postulates.
If the last happens to be the case, technology must be developed for very deep drilling and a system to recycle the increased carbon dioxide must be implemented. This is not the optimal scenario, but it would give a very large time span for, if it exists, the cushion of hydrocarbons is immense.
The best scenario would be to have practical fusion power, with an interesting proxy being light and intrinsically secure fission reactors. Practical fusion power does not require a carbon water air energy cycle to be operated.
Practical fusion power and a constant population level create the technological basis for the freedom of want.
To develop such technologies we need healthy, flexible, mobile social spaces living over a minimum universal use of resources. These cannot be provided by the global master-servant social order. This must change in a cooperative order.
It is no more a problem of justice among humans. It is a problem of development for the species.

Tom Hickey said...

@ Paulo

Right . Good analysis. And as long as conventional economics holds sway in global policy circles, then it will be business, or should I say "extraction." as usual.